At the bedside, I stare into his face: Eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling, drained of life, face settling back into itself, nose still a large red mountain, his mouth gaping open, rigid, as if stuck in one last slow scream.

I know I should cry, but no tears come now. Instead, I take his hand in my hand, his skin feels wrong, cold, gone, ended.

LATER, MY MOTHER FINDS ME IN THE living room, her eyes bloodshot, hair at strange angles.

She sits down on the couch beside me and then crumples, her knotted body going limp, her head falling into my lap.

“I don’t want to live anymore,” she says into my legs.

She quivers against me. I rest my hand on her knot. I stare deep into the mouth of a new void.

THE NEXT MORNING, IT HITS ME WHEN I wake. I gasp for breath in my old bed, eyes to the ceiling, my father, my father, my god, my father, gone.

◆The word grief is derived from the Old French grever, meaning “afflict, burden, oppress,” and from the Latin gravare, meaning “to make heavy”

◆Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed

◆After conducting two decades of research, researchers determined there were five trajectories to grief:

Resilience

Recovery

Chronic Dysfunction

Delayed Grief or Trauma

Suicidal Tendencies

I TRY TO RECALL HOW HENRY FELT, WHAT it meant to kiss him. My mourning is too thick. I remember nothing, even when the phone rings, even when it is his voice through the line.

MY FATHER’S WILL INCLUDES INSTRUCtions: The Acres will be sold, the profits divided by three among us, and he will be reduced to ash.

VISION

Ten years old, in my father’s truck, the wind whipping through the window as he drives us over The Acres. His hands are rough on the steering wheel from hauling meat. He doesn’t smell like liquor.

“I don’t tell it to you enough,” he says. “I’m not really that way, you know.”

“Tell me what?” I ask, distracted by the land whipping by.

“I do love you,” he says.

“Love you, too.”

Then it gets quiet. He keeps driving like nothing has happened, though there is a small warmth in my young chest. His favorite sad song is playing on the radio. Tears begin in my eyes and I hide them by staring out the window.

THE ROOM IS MAGNIFICENT IN SIZE. IT IS cold, refrigerated. My father’s body rests in the center, draped in the white sheet.

“I simply need a family member to identify,” says the coroner. He has a nose as if from a statue, skin waxy and un-sunned.

My mother wails from the hallway where my brother holds her. It has stayed this way since his death: My brother holding my mother while I make the arrangements.